Category: iPod

Apple files for iPhone trademark

The iPhone cometh?

AppleInsider reports that Apple has filed for a trademark on “iPhone.”

The filing, made last month with a Far Eastern trademark office, is the latest in a long list of incontrovertible evidence to suggest the Cupertino, Calif.-based iPod maker is in the final developmental stages of the project, which is expected to merge traditional cellular capabilities with an iPod digital music player.

“Incontrovertible!”

“You keep using that word.  I do not think that it means what you think it means.”

(What is it with the movie quotes today?  Beats the Macalope.)

Now, the Macalope believes in the iPhone, but “incontrovertible”?

Analysts revise iPod sales estimates.

Reduced iPod sales estimates from several analysts.

MacNN reports that Merill Lynch is cutting its iPod sales estimate for Apple’s fourth fiscal quarter from 8.3 million to 7.7 million, following cuts by Piper Jaffray and UBS yesterday.

Merill Lynch’s estimate would still be a 20% increase year-over-year, but a rather precipitous drop from the previous quarter’s 8.111 million.  Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster and UBS’s Ben Reitzes had rather more optimistic estimates of 8.2 million and 8.12 million respectively.

The Macalope doesn’t have access to the monthly data, but Merill’s estimate seems a bit conservative.  Munster indicates that without the revised lineup, their estimate would have been 7.4 million for the quarter, so Merill’s saying there was only 300,000 in pent-up demand (yeah, different analysts, but they all already have the actual numbers for July and August, so their estimates for the quarter without the revised lineup shouldn’t be that different).

The Macalope’s going to go with 8.1 million, siding with Munster and Reitzes but hedging his bet a little.

All of the analysts predicted stronger than anticipated Mac sales.

Dear Silly Pundits…

Report indicates iPod sales up for 4th fiscal quarter.

MacNN quotes a report today that says Apple will meet or exceed its guideline for the fourth fiscal quarter.

Of particular note to the Macalope was this:

We anticipate continued strength in its Mac business (up 6 percent quarter over quarter) driven by MacBook and a rebound in its iPod business (up 5 percent quarter over quarter) helped by new Nanos and initial shipments of its new Shuffle.

So, can we cut the “slipping iPod sales” crap?

UPDATE:  Some math for you:

Assuming the report is correct, a 5% increase would mean Apple sold about 8,517,000 iPods in the fourth fiscal quarter, a 32% increase year-over-year.  iPod sales also showed a 32% increase year-over-year in the third fiscal quarter.  As the Macalope has said, iPod sales growth is leveling off.  Sales continue to increase.

Dear Walt Mossberg of The Wall Street Journal:

Walt Mossberg shows the silly pundits how its done.

The Macalope just finished reading your review of the new iPods, The New iPod: Ready for Battle? (subscription only) (thanks to Brian in comments for a non-subscription link), and as a follower of iPod punditry, he was confused.

Next month marks the fifth anniversary of one of the most successful products of the digital era, Apple Computer’s iPod music player. Since 2001, potential iPod-killers have come and gone like autumn foliage. Apple claims an astonishing 76% market share in the U.S. for the iPod and an equally amazing 88% share of the U.S. legal music download market for its companion iTunes online store. Over 60 million iPods and 1.5 billion songs have been sold.

Well, yes, but where’s the reference to how iPod sales fell leading up to the day before the Showtime event? Clearly the devastating decline from Apple’s monstrous first fiscal quarter right up to the announcement of new models means the iPod is doomed. You should look into that.

But, Walt, that’s not the only place where you drop the ball of conventional iPod punditry. You mention the Zune and RealNetworks’ forthcoming player as potential threats, but then just launch into your iPod review.

Still, this autumn, the iPod could face its greatest challenge. Microsoft, after failing for years to combat the iconic gadget, will launch a new assault Nov. 14 with a player called Zune.

…

Not only that, but this week, RealNetworks’ Rhapsody music service, the best of the iTunes competitors, will announce its own player, jointly developed with SanDisk, which is the second-place player maker, albeit a distant second.

So, this holiday season Apple has made some of the biggest changes to the iPod and iTunes in years.

No, no, no. Walt, Walt, Walt, this won’t do at all. You devote the rest of the article to reviewing actual features of iPods you can currently buy. That’s simply not how it’s done.

The Macalope shall elucidate.

Take a look at Vic Keegan, Sven Rafferty, Kieran McCarthy and Mike Elgan. You’re supposed to parlay the fantastic but ultimately unsustainable success the iPod has had into some kind of failure – don’t forget to call falling sales growth “slipping sales”! – and breathlessly list imaginary features the Zune may one day have and ask why the iPod doesn’t have those today.

It’s impossible to know if Apple can sustain its remarkably high market shares in the face of new competition, but it is going into the battle with better products at better prices.

Aagh!

Walt, no! The iPod is doomed! Doomed!

Tsk.

And you write for one of the most respected daily newspapers in the world.

…

Actually, that explains a lot.

Sincerely,
The Macalope

Dear Computerworld's Mike Elgan…

The Macalope looks at – sigh – yet another “Zune spells Doom” piece.

The Macalope read your latest correspondence entitled “Why Microsoft’s Zune scares Apple to the core” and he believes you may have accidentally left out a critical fact. Nowhere in the piece did the Macalope find the names of the employees at Apple you spoke with to back up your claim. Surely this was simply an oversight in editing, so please advise at your earliest convenience who at Apple is so a-scared of the Zune.

The Macalope has some other comments that he will break down as responses to your six points.

1. Microsoft is hatching a consumer media ‘perfect storm’.

…

Apple fans are overconfident in the iPod because Apple once commanded 92 per cent of music player market share, a number that has since fallen to around 70 per cent. About 30 million people own iPods.

Please define “perfect” as used in this instance, as when Paul Thurrott is asking re the Zune “What the heck are these people thinking?”, the Macalope is concerned that you might have the boat/storm metaphor backwards.

As for the market share figures you quote, the Macalope believes you’re comparing apples (no pun intended) and oranges. The 92 percent market share number was the percentage of the U.S. market for digital music players that were hard-drive based. The 70 percent number is the percentage of the U.S. market for hard-drive and flash-based digital music players. Apple’s market share was recalculated with the introduction of the flash-based iPod shuffle.

The Macalope will leave it up to his readers to decide if that error was due to laziness or dishonesty.

Frankly, the Macalope thinks the 92 percent number is a little silly. While he wouldn’t go as far as John Gruber did here (certainly not with the benefit of hindsight), there is little differentiation from a consumer’s perspective between hard-drive and flash-based units.

Also, you may not be aware of it, but the iPod actually works on Windows. And while the Zune ties into the Xbox, Microsoft has sold probably a bit over 25 million of those and Apple has sold over 60 million iPods.

2. The Zune is social and viral

Like a disease!

Think of it as a portable, wireless, hardware version of MySpace.

Ah! Like a venereal disease! One that’s easy to catch that leaves ugly festering sores! Gotcha!

3. Zune may have more programming

…

While Apple launched its movie business with movies from Disney (where Apple CEO Steve Jobs sits on the board), Microsoft has already lined up Twentieth Century Fox, Paramount Pictuers, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal Pictures, Warner Bros, Lions Gate Entertainment and MGM.

Which will be available… some time next year. Apple, by your assumption, will only ever have Disney.

4. Zune’s screen is better for movies

True. It is larger, but it’s the same resolution.

5. Zune is actually pretty cool

The Zune is unlike any product Microsoft has ever shipped. It’s actually very nicely designed, surprisingly minimalist and (dare I say it?) ‘cool’. (Zune marketing looks cool, too. The user interface is fluid and appealing – and, again, like MySpace – customisable. Users will be able to personalise the Zune interface with photos, ‘themes’, ‘skins’ and custom colours.

Oh, so they can crap it up. Make it look like a five-dollar whore, just like MySpace. Excellent.

The Macalope should warn you, the minute a 40-year-old says something is “cool” to “tweens, teens and 20-somethings”, it instantly becomes uncool.

Way to go, Mike.

Even if Apple is able to retain its lead, it could still be hurt – badly – by the Zune, which will capture mind share, grab market share and squeeze Apple on pricing.

OK, now you’re just making things up. The cheapest Zune – which, remember, is not on sale yet – is priced 99 cents higher than the second most expensive iPod.

Apple is scared. And for good reason.

Again, who did you talk to at Apple who said they’re scared? Please advise as nowhere do you quote anyone even off the record saying this.

Apple has recently and preemptively lowered the price of iPods, announced an iTV set-top box – which will ship later than Vista – and is probably working feverishly on a bigger-screen, wirelessly enabled iPod.

“Which will ship later than Vista”?

This production of Non-Sequitur Theater will return after a commercial break.

Please, please, please, for the love of god, please tell the Macalope what could possibly be the relevance of juxtaposing the fact that Microsoft announced an operating system upgrade five years ago and – after gutting feature after feature – is finally shipping it in January (maybe!), and the fact that Apple announced a product in September that it’s shipping in the first quarter of 2007.

Because any possible explanation must – by the laws of logic that govern the universe in which we live – be simply hysterical.

Ultimately, your failure to treat any of the Zune’s numerous shortcomings as such and your failure to even mention others (doesn’t play any currently available DRM-protected songs or videos) at all tend to make the piece seem more like propaganda than analysis.

There seems to be this great determination on the part of a number of silly pundits to get ahead of some imagined curve and be the first to declare the iPod dead.

All analysis must be made on the basis of currently available information, so the Macalope is not saying the Zune will never overtake the iPod. But let’s just say he finds the reports of its death to be greatly exaggerated.

Sadly, being a technology pundit is truly never having to say you’re sorry. You can be wrong for years and never lose your job.

It must be good work if you can get it, so hang on to that gig, Mike.

Sincerely,
The Macalope

Zune reaches critical mass of craptacularosity

The Zune: currently no threat, if you didn’t know that already.

The Macalope was willing to give the Zune the benefit of the doubt for a while, but yesterday it reached a point where the negatives overtook the positives.

The Zune had three things the iPod didn’t: a physically larger screen, wireless and… brown. But as Pee Wee Herman said “Everyone I know has a big ‘but’.”

The screen is larger, but the resolution is still the same as the iPod’s. It has wireless, but it may drain the heck out of the battery and might only be useful if you run into Jim Allchin.

And, in the Macalope’s opinion, brown is a fine color for mythical beasts, but not for electronic devices. Many who have seen it in person say it has a nice retro look, but unless you’re going to put a tacky brown face plate on your cell phone, it doesn’t go with any of the devices you already own.  How’s a girl supposed to accessorize?

The Macalope believed the one thing that could make up for the Zune’s big “buts” and the iPod’s market advantage was aggressive pricing. But the Zune is actually 99 cents more expensive than the iPod. And that’s the cheapest Zune you can buy.  If you want to get play in the Zune pool, you’ve got to shell out $249.99.

The subscription service is a ridiculously high $14.99 a month or, if you want to buy songs individually, they’re roughly the same as iTunes’ 99 cents. Although, because Microsoft sells 80 Microsoft points for a dollar and songs are 79 points, you get one free song for every 396 you buy – so act now!

Well, not now, because you can’t buy it now. Act Nov. 14th!

But if you’ve purchased any DRM-protected songs (including the oxymoronically named Plays4Sure), they won’t play on the Zune. Remember when the news of the Zune was first leaked and we were breathlessly told by Microsoft boosters that all your iTunes songs are belong to us because they would somehow magically be re-licensed on the Zune because Apple stupidly published that API called NSListOfSongsToReLicense and Microsoft is just so mega-rich and mega-cool that they can do that and no one else in the world can and OMG, OMG, OMFG?!

Yeah, well, about all those songs you already bought… how’d you like to pay for them all over again? Or, better yet, every month for the rest of your life?

And the Macalope can’t help but wonder what the activation process is for the Zune, the store and the media. Does it involve 16-digit alphanumeric codes that you get after waiting on hold to talk to someone in Redmond? Frankly, the Macalope’s had enough problems with registering computers on iTunes, although the added ability to deregister them all in one swell foop has pretty much cleared that up.  Still, the process just doesn’t need to be any more complicated and you can forgive the Macalope if he doesn’t trust Microsoft to make a better mouse trap here.

Finally, the Zune’s supposed video advantage over the iPod may be difficult to enjoy. Microsoft’s store won’t be offering video on launch, so you have to bring your own.

Just, you know, make sure they aren’t DRM-protected. Because they won’t play.

Phew.

The Macalope’s not saying the Zune is DOA, but in its current form it’s remarkably troubled and is simply not a compelling competitor to the iPod. Microsoft has not leapfrogged Apple at all because each leap forward is matched by a leap back.

Ah, but the Zune could beat the iPod if it had a chain saw!

The Macalope looks at some ill-conceived iPod gloom from SvenOnTech.

SvenOnTech – “The technology resource you can’t resist!” – proves rather resistable today as he Sven Rafferty [the Macalope originally missed the byline and attributed the piece to “Sven” – it’s been corrected throughout] [UPDATE AGAIN – Jon Eilers writes to note that the piece on SvenOnTech was misattributed to him. It was actually written by Sven Rafferty.] takes the “Zune spells ‘doom'” argument for a spin and goes careening off Reality Bluff and into Fantasy Lake.

With Apple’s slipping sales for months in a row…

You mean the months leading up to a widely-expected refresh?  Those months?

First Vic Keegan wants to compare successive quarters, now Rafferty wants to look at successive months. [UPDATE: for those who don’t want to click through the link, the important point is that a serious analysis would have looked at changes year over year to avoid cyclicality predominately based on the iPod’s product cycle. Also, Rafferty’ comment is not supported with any data – we are left to wonder how many months he’s talking about.]

MacNN noted that Piper Jaffrey predicted Apple would come close to 8.6 million in iPod sales for the third calendar quarter, which would be a 33.3 percent increase year over year and a small increase in sales growth from the second quarter.

The Macalope will say it again.  iPod sales growth may have been slowing.  But iPod sales are not “slipping.”  They continue to grow.

…with the iPod and the how-hum [sic] refresh we witnessed at the Showtime event, Steve Jobs best be working on getting that full-screen iPod ready for Macworld or he can start kissing his bread winner goodbye.

The bar is set really high for Apple.  If it doesn’t provide a $50 touch-screen iPod with seven days of battery life and free movies, an event is ho-hum.

Point of fact, the event was apparently exactly what investors were expecting, as Apple’s share price saw a modest uptick since Sept. 12th (today showed a substantial jump largely driven by expected increases in the Mac’s market share).

But enter the Zune.

Removing any Microsoft bias, the Zune isn’t that bad.

The Macalope can picture the marketing materials now:  “The Microsoft Zune.  It’s not that bad!”

Rafferty then goes on to list all that’s right with the Zune without listing any of the numerous questions about it.  For, you see, a point has already been chosen and, to support it, the Zune must be rubber and the iPod glue.

The Wi-Fi sharing is great, too, and even though there’s no video support, that will be here soon like a more robust Windows was with 3.11 back in the early 90s.

Yes, Microsoft is slow out of the gate but, remember, it lumbers ever forward!  Apple, apparently, will never update the iPod ever again.

The remarkable assery of this piece is that Rafferty is not even taking the bad data points for the iPod (and you really have to try to find them!) and comparing them to the good ones for the Zune.

He’s taking the current features of the iPod and comparing them to imaginary future features of the Zune – a product you can’t even buy yet.  That’s vapor^2!

Where’s the full-screen Steve? The Wi-Fi? The Bluetooth? The meat?!

Where’s the neural interface?  The time warp feature so you can enjoy tomorrow’s music today?  Where’s the hoozifluffer with the wingjambiddler?!

If the iPod doesn’t bring on a new cool factor (and regurgatating the iPod mini via the nano doesn’t qualify,)…

And the Macalope guesses offering the first wearable digital music player ever and the ability to buy and play movies on an iPod – today! – don’t count either.

…then Apple can once again remember the days of the Macintosh Performa and try to figure out, “How did we lose all the market share…again?”

Wow.  Did the Mac really have 75 percent market share before the Performa came out?  The Macalope sure remembers those days differently.

Frankly, the Macalope prefers such articles the way John Dvorak writes them.  At least Dvorak goes out on a limb and tries to convince you the Zune has already won the battle.  Rafferty would have you believe the iPod’s vast lead is in dire jeopardy because future Zunes will be better than this one, which “isn’t that bad.”  And isn’t out yet.

The worst you can say for the iPod and the best you can say for the Zune right now is that Microsoft has announced a modest offering that they may decide to take a loss on in an attempt to gain market share.  To pretend that only Microsoft can leapfrog features is to ignore reality (Apple and Microsoft also have this whole operating system thing going on if you haven’t noticed) for the sake of tritely playing devil’s advocate.

The Macalope would advise Rafferty to save the “Apple, are you listening?” tone at least until Microsoft actually ship a Zune.